Budget Your Investment Wisely

Although sales managers recognize that sales training is important, sometimes sales training dollars are squandered on programs that don’t take hold or, worse, turn out to be irrelevant to the real needs of the sales force. Ironically, multiple ROI studies show that sales training, when well implemented, has the fastest ROI of any investment that a company can make. So wasting those training dollars is a double-whammy on productivity. To help you understand how to ensure that your training dollars are well spent, we asked a broad range of nationally and internationally known experts what sales managers should consider when selecting a training firm and the sales training courses to be taught. They gave us 12 key rules to ensure you consistently get the highest ROI from your sales training spending.

Rule #1
Diagnose your problems.
Sales challenges are many: lousy prospecting, losing consistently to the competition, failure to handle objections, not calling high enough, and on and on. Correcting any of these problems can be a major effort and requires a different type of training. Therefore, if you’re going to spend your training dollars wisely, you need to know exactly what’s wrong with your sales process. The absolute best way to diagnose the problems that your sales team faces is to go on multiple sales calls with a number of reps. Once you’ve seen with your own eyes the problems they encounter as a group and individually, on an ongoing basis, you’ll be better prepared to decide what kind of training is most likely to have the most positive impact.
Source: Julie Thomas, CEO and president of ValueVision Associates.

Rule #2
Identify current gaps and future needs.
It’s not enough to understand the challenges that your sales reps are facing today. If your industry is about to change – and that’s true of just about every industry today – you must anticipate the types of training that you’ll need in the future. Ideally, the skills that you’re addressing with sales training today will lay the groundwork for skills that your team will need to address the challenges of the future. For example, if your current need is to develop sales reps to be better solution-builders, you might want to prepare them for future training when they’ll be applying those skills more widely, perhaps as a process of cross-selling with other segments of your firm.
Source: Linda Richardson, CEO, Richardson

Rule #3
Define measurable results.
Training budgets are always a function of how many people you have and what level of training they need. However, regardless of how few or how many sales reps are being trained, it’s important to understand exactly what the training is intended to accomplish in terms of revenue, market share and profit. Far too often sales managers provide skills training that they think their team needs but without having a real idea how that training will increase sales. Ideally, sales managers should be able to quantify the results of the training. Just as important, they should make certain that the team being trained understands the expectation that investment in their training will pay off. Without measurable metrics, sales training is largely wasted effort, because there’s no way to see what worked (and what didn’t), virtually guaranteeing that future training efforts will be poorly focused.
Source: Jerry Acuff, president, Delta Leadership Group

Rule # 4
Customize the training.
Now that the Internet is turning every product into a commodity, sales reps must be more than just information brokers – they must be able to act as knowledgeable solution-builders. The problem that many organizations face is that their sales approach is still in the 1980s and, unfortunately, many of the sales training courses available today are so old that they only serve to reinforce bad habits. Because consultative “solution selling” is different for every firm, any effective sales training program today must be tailored to the needs of the organization. In other words, the era of one-size-fits-all sales training has long since come to an end. By the way, customized training has a side benefit – since it addresses the real and specific needs of the sales team, they’re more likely to buy into the approach and become excited about applying it.
Source: Bob Beck, president, Sales Builders

Rule #5
Focus on one or two key skills.
Sales managers sometimes believe they can save money on training by having a mass “train-a-thon” at the yearly sales meeting, covering every sales skill in the book. However, rather than being cost-effective, this type of indiscriminate training is usually a waste of money. The likelihood that the reps will retain anything useful is small because no subject matter, by necessity, will be covered in enough depth to allow the team to master the skill being taught. Rather than trying to train on everything, find the one or two sales skills that will have the most positive impact on your sales team – and then provide in-depth training on those skills, with follow-up and reinforcement.
Source: Sharon Daniels, president and CEO, Achieve Global

Rule #6
Avoid the “circus” training approach.
Organizations used to hold sales training sessions as if they were some kind of traveling circus. The training company would come into the facility, train for two or three days, offer lots of selling success stories, show hundreds of slides and talk hours of sales theory, and then they’d be gone to their next engagement. Training should be a process, not a single event. The “acid test” for effective sales training is when a sales training program can be repeated multiple times on multiple groups of people – with positive and entirely predicable results. That’s only possible if the sales training is part of a long-term commitment and, ideally, a partnership between your organization and the firm that you’ve hired.
Source: Bob Beck, president, Sales Builders

Rule #7
Integrate training into your sales system.
A sales system is a collection of processes to consistently identify opportunities, manage opportunities, manage relationships and coach to performance. Investing in a sales system is the most effective way to use training dollars because this sets the foundation for all other individual development needs. A sales team not having a sales system is like a football team not having a playbook. Without it, it is difficult or even impossible to determine what each individual needs to do to contribute to the success of the organization. By contrast, if you have a sales system, you have a clearer understanding of the key competencies required to be successful in a sales job in your company. That allows you to implement the exact kind of sales training that will improve performance of sales reps working inside your sales system.
Source: Sam Reese, CEO, Miller Heiman

Rule #8
Favor tactical over strategic training.
Let’s face it: Sales reps don’t want or need a college course full of inverted triangles, interlocking circles and general psychological theory. What they need is a new, fresh approach to deal with the real issues they face out in the field on a daily basis. Sales training should address tactical skills as opposed to broad strategic selling issues. For example, many sales training courses address how to handle a sales situation after there is a qualified prospect in the pipeline. However, the real challenge today, for every sales rep, is to build a solid pipeline of opportunities. Rather than a course on sales theory, reps typically need tactical help to discover new ways to uncover good opportunities, and then move prospects through the pipeline.
Source: Bob Beck, president, Sales Builders

Rule #9
Train proactively rather than reactively.
It is a challenge for sales managers to assess their training budget needs. The best organizations make consistent sales training investments and insure that this is an important line item on the annual budget. They believe that sales training is a central component of their overall growth strategy. If training is only done in reaction to poor performance or to “keep the troops happy,” it will never be a true investment. As a general rule, many companies look at an annual sales training investment that is equivalent to approximately 2 to 3 percent of the salesperson’s annual income. This investment needs to be combined with the salary, bonus and expense line items of the sales force and run through the company’s ROI models. Like any other investment, it only makes sense if it drives corporate results.
Source: Sam Reese, CEO, Miller Heiman

Rule #10
Train managers how to coach.
Sales training doesn’t “stick” unless it’s reinforced, on a daily basis, through coaching. However, most sales managers were once top sales reps who knew how to sell, but don’t have a clue about how to coach other people to sell. Coaching requires great patience, the willingness to slowly help others see their mistakes, and wisdom to know when to praise and when to correct – all new behaviors for most hard-driving sales managers. So, if you want to get the most out of your sales training dollars, include funding to train your managers to be better coaches – and then provide them with coaching and reinforcement on that all-important skill.
Source: Linda Richardson, CEO, Richardson

Rule #11
Reinforce training in multiple ways.
Ultimately, sales training is about changing the sales culture. However, even the most dramatic and effective sales training is likely to be ignored if the newly trained rep is dropped back into the same old environment from whence he or she originally started. Habits, bad and good, die hard, so if you’re going to transform what’s been learned through sales training into a day-to-day habit, you’ll need to find ways to reinforce that training. Online learning, e-mails, coaching, self-evaluations, CRM screens, refresher courses – there is no lack of potential reinforcement methods. Make certain that the environment supports the new behaviors and helps sales reps to put them into action.
Source: Sharon Daniels, president and CEO, Achieve Global

Rule #12
Measure ROI rigorously.
If you want your training dollars to be well spent, you need to measure exactly what training is impacting revenue and profit. Measuring ROI means pinning down real, quantifiable numbers – not fuzzy numbers like “X sales reps trained” but numbers that would impress a CFO, such as a 10 percent growth in the average deal size, or 20 percent increase in the number of deals per quarter. You should be able to watch the revenue and profit change throughout your firm as the sales reps in various regions are trained. Once you’ve drawn a clear and understandable connection between sales training and the bottom line, you’ll not only find it easier to get a good training budget in the future, but you can sleep at night knowing that you’ve had a substantial and positive impact on your firm’s success.
Source: Julie Thomas, CEO and president of ValueVision Associates.
– Geoffrey James